Your name was Jamie, or Jenny.
I like Jenny better, so I’ll invent you.

You came for pills.
You said you were feeling worse
There were wrinkles on your face
You told us you stopped drinking in 08.

We asked you if you had support at home
You smiled, you said your mother
(she still calls you a pisshead)
-once a pisshead, always a pisshead, she says-
Do you have a husband? You do!
“He’s brilliant, he supports me…”

We know he was abusive
Obese and an alcoholic as well.
But you smiled, and nodded
And trembled in your seat.
And lied to us.
All we were trying to do was reinvent you.

"The caged bird sings, with fearful trill - of things unknown, but longed for still" Maya Angelou*

The caged bird sings
With fearful trill
The cage bird sings of freedom.
I don’t know why it lives.
I don’t know why it trills
But for me, it is for freedom.

I wonder if it sings, because it can
And if it hops because it may.
I wonder if it dreams of freedom.

If I let him, will he fly?
And if he flies?
He’s never known of freedom.

I walk away because I can
And I forget because I may.
And in that, I lose my freedom.

The caged bird died
It trills no more
It died, it died for freedom.

I smoke because smoking kills.
-I fancy controlling when I die-
So consider me informed.

(And when you put destroyed lungs
On the packets, it makes me smile.
I’ve seen lungs of healthy people. All black.
One way or another.
Smoking kills and so does everything else.
One more side effect of dying)

And I’d rather know I hold death in my hand
Glowing like the last ember of my days
Glowing red, and consuming me.
I’d rather feel it, this life
Scratching my lungs and clawing my throat
Burning me, making me cough
Knowing I’m responsible
And that for a second, if I die, I know why
I smile, I smile! At the tar coating my lungs
Deliciously, deliriously, I laugh
I laugh at the little death in my hand.

I live in a town that lives.
Austere shadows play in the gray weather
-the night waits to extinguish them.
(Others see the sun)

How I wish I had a shadow that followed me.
And in my final day
I’d greet it as a friend it took a long time to meet.

There’s little to say of a life of almosts.
Songs are written for great deeds
And poetry for nothing.

At least, at least
This nothing has my all.